A Collar of Jewels

by Pamela Pope

  The caption under the photograph read: Mrs Elena Berman of the American Red Cross with nursing staff at the Richmond Hospital which is a gift to the Americans from the British Red Cross and the Order of St John.

  The outcome of the publication was exactly what she had expected. A week later Max came to Richmond. He had seen the article and followed up the news of her arrival, and she was forced to admit she had courted the publicity in the hope of it happening. Not for anything in the world would she have given him the satisfaction of knowing she wanted to see him. The newspaper report had been an opportunity. Published news of her had brought him to her before and somehow she had felt sure it would do so again.

  Ellie was in the hospital grounds when a junior nurse came running to tell her he had arrived, and she was glad of the chance to compose herself before coming face to face with her husband after so many years.

  ‘Send him out here, please,’ she instructed the nurse. Much easier to meet him in the open air.

  Her legs trembled as she waited, and she pressed her hands together against her breast as she tried to still the much greater trembling within. For days she had been rehearsing a speech but now her mouth was dry and she couldn’t remember a word of what she’d been going to say. She walked towards the hospital so that she would see him come down the steps, but kept close to the shrubbery so that she would be just out of view. What a fool she was. Surely she’d no reason for wanting to see him, other than curiosity.

  The little nurse returned to the door with him and pointed towards the place where she had left Ellie, then she went back inside, leaving him to make his own way across the garden. My goodness, how handsome he was still. It could have been William. He wore a black lounge suit with a dark blue striped tie. His shoes were black patent leather and he carried a trilby hat and a cane. The years seemed to melt away as she watched him approach and she was almost tempted to run towards him as she had done when she was a girl.

  She walked out into the path and waited. His step slowed. When they were a few paces apart he also stopped.

  ‘I guessed you would come, Max,’ she said.

  ‘Why didn’t you write and tell me? I would have met you. Did you sail to Southampton?’

  ‘No, Liverpool.’

  His hair was still thick, and still black apart from wings of grey at his temples which suited him. Thankfully he hadn’t grown a moustache which would have been aging, but now he was closer she could see there were fine lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth.

  ‘I’ve been hoping to see you,’ he said. ‘Ever since William told me about your Red Cross work I’ve kept an eye on the news. I even went to a rally of American nurses in London in case you were there.’

  ‘I’m surprised. I thought from the way you swayed William into seeing your point of view you still thought of me as too dominating to be worthy of your time.’

  ‘Oh, Ellie.’ He sighed with exasperation. ‘I haven’t come all this way to embark on yet another analysis of my past sins.’

  ‘Then what have you come for?’

  ‘I could give you a whole list of reasons.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear them.’

  ‘You haven’t changed. You’re still as beautiful, and obviously just as infuriating as ever.’

  ‘Am I? Perhaps it’s because I am so angry that you got at William.’

  ‘I said nothing biased.’

  They sat down on one of the new wooden seats placed where wounded patients would get a good view over the parkland. Deer were grazing in the distance.

  Ellie sat with her back very straight, but her primness hid inner turmoil. ‘After he had seen you William wrote a letter criticising me. It was cruel.’

  ‘And you’re blaming me.’ In contrast Max relaxed against the seat, a wry smile curving his mouth.

  ‘He’s never said anything like that before. How dare you run me down to our son and …’

  ‘I did nothing of the kind. He must have come to his own conclusions.’

  It was a cool day and the wind caught them. Max reached over to draw Ellie’s cape closer round her shoulders, but she shrugged off the brief contact. His fingers had brushed her neck. Had she allowed the physical response to spread she would have been weakened.

  ‘And another thing,’ she said. ‘I was shocked to hear you’ve run my uncle out of his own business. You’re callous, Max. You only ever think of yourself. The company was Julian’s life.’

  ‘Stop judging me, Ellie.’ Max’s attitude changed. He was no longer so amiable. ‘Julian Cromer is sick in mind and body. It’d been coming on for years and he was no longer fit to make even the smallest company decisions. He was also in financial difficulties and agreed to me buying him out.’

  ‘You could have let him retire and keep his shares.’

  ‘No. He was ruining us. As it was I had to work damned hard to bring us out of trouble.’ He leaned forward to look into her eyes. ‘I didn’t come here to talk about Julian or the company, or even William. I came to talk about us. I want the past to be buried.’

  The tug at Ellie’s heart was so painful she put up her hands as if to ward off further assault. Her shoulders pulled inwards as she closed her eyes momentarily.

  ‘Don’t,’ she begged him. ‘For me the past is already buried and I won’t resurrect it.’

  ‘Then we can start again.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Ellie, I love you.’

  She drew a sharp breath. The words she had longed to hear over the years had at last been uttered, but they had come too late and now she didn’t want to hear them. She couldn’t understand herself. All she knew was that she needed more than a casual declaration.

  ‘That’s easy to say.’ She was aloof. ‘No doubt William put you up to it, but it’s not enough. My life is full without you and I won’t let you walk back into it thinking all is forgiven and forgotten.’

  ‘It all happened so long ago,’ said Max. ‘I’ve done as you wished and stayed away, but I’ve kept faith with you. Call it penitence or what you will.’

  ‘Are you expecting me to reward you for it?’

  ‘I think you still love me.’

  She was incensed. His presumptuous arrogance touched her pride.

  ‘You can think what you like,’ she stormed, getting to her feet. ‘It changes nothing.’

  He also got up. Standing so close she was afraid he would see the throbbing pulse in her neck. She covered it with a tense hand, aware that he, too, was under stress, but rejection of him had become a deeply ingrained habit which made no allowances.

  ‘Don’t you think I’ve served a long enough sentence for my crime?’ he asked. ‘I’ve said I love you. What more can I say?’

  ‘Words. They’re just words, Max. When you can prove their worth I’ll listen.’

  At the end of the afternoon she sent him away. Then she went up to her room and wept at her own foolishness.

  *

  It was not only Max who saw the account in the newspaper of Elena Berman’s post in England. Julian Cromer saw it too, but unlike her estranged husband he didn’t do anything about it. Just seeing her name revived a host of memories which added to the strain he had been under since her departure back in ’97, and after looking at the photograph for several minutes he tore it out of the newspaper, screwed it into a tight ball and threw it across the room. But the action didn’t bring relief. For the rest of the day he shut himself in his study with a bottle of spirits and tortured himself anew with recriminations and accusations.

  With typical human frailty he needed a scapegoat, someone to blame for all his misfortunes over the past twenty-five years, and after the death of Oliver Devlin he had transferred that blame and laid it at the feet of his niece, Ellie. From the moment she had come into his life it seemed things had started to go wrong, and they had continued to do so ever since.

  He thought of the first few years after he had married Millicent as the g
olden period of his life. Court Carriages had become his, he had moved into Fortune Cottage, and his father had been the source of many beautiful, valuable possessions. And then she had come, the loveliest creature he had ever seen, and bit by bit he’d lost everything. Now all he had left was a waspish wife and Fortune Cottage stripped of all its treasures. In moments of deepest gloom he knew it was his punishment for having lusted after his sister’s child. Even if they’d both been free they would have been forbidden by law to marry.

  It was Ellie’s fault he hadn’t been able to complete his acquisition of the works of art gracing his father’s house in London. She had come along and cured the old man of his drinking so that he’d known what was going on. Ellie had brought Oliver Devlin on the scene, too. Ellie had so bewitched Julian he had become obsessed to the point of risking his reputation to have her, and in the end he had killed for her, or so it seemed in his troubled mind. No one had ever found out that his hand had held the knife. Sometimes he wished he could have hanged for it. It might have been preferable to the private hell he had suffered ever since.

  Ellie was the reason why he now drank too much himself and incurred bills he could barely pay. He’d needed the alcohol at first to help him stop thinking about her. Ellie was the cause of Max Berman’s arrival, and the reason for him eventually bringing over the objectionable brat who had stepped so unfairly into a fortune. Ellie, Ellie … Her name was engraved on his heart. Ellie, no doubt, was behind Max Berman’s vendetta towards himself. Julian hated the man, even more than he had hated Devlin. And he never wanted to see Ellie again.

  Max had treated him like an imbecile. In the last few years he’d used humouring tactics in an attempt to get him out of the company, but Julian had held on for as long as possible, until his financial problems had forced him to make a deal. Berman had tried to make out he was mentally unstable, which was plain slanderous! Admittedly, there were days when he could only find peace in brandy, but he was not an alcoholic like his father had been. He could stop as soon as he had blotted out the spectre of Oliver Devlin falling to the ground with the knife in his back.

  ‘You’re a danger to us all when you’re in that state,’ Max had said. ‘We’re doing vital work here. A word from your drunken mouth dropped in the wrong ear could be damaging to the war effort, to say the least.’

  ‘Who are you to speak to me like that?’ Julian had demanded. ‘A bloody Russian Jew. Who knows where your loyalties lie?’

  Come to that, Julian couldn’t be quite sure of his own feelings towards the enemy. Their good friends the Gottmanns had become like part of the family when Charlotte married Johann Gottmann in 1912. She had gone to live in Germany with him and only spasmodic news had been smuggled out since the outbreak of hostilities. The Gottmann parents in England had been interned at the beginning of the war.

  Perhaps it was the German connection which caused the Cromers’ circle of friends to dwindle. Or it could have been Julian’s heavy drinking. He could carry his liquor well, but by the end of an evening’s entertaining he was usually in an unpleasantly argumentative mood. Certainly, many began turning down invitations to Millicent’s parties when Francis became a conscientious objector, and she’d been devastated. But a new group of people had taken the place of the old, and Millicent had been in her element once more. The wives of Naval and Military officers living in the district had been pleased to accept her lavish hospitality, until Max had suddenly clamped down on the expense.

  ‘We can’t afford to entertain the whole of His Majesty’s forces,’ he’d complained.

  ‘Where’s your patriotism?’ Julian had retaliated. ‘Hospitality to the troops is of major importance. Their morale has to be kept up.’

  ‘Then why isn’t Millicent opening Fortune Cottage to the boys off to the trenches?’

  Millicent entertaining common soldiers! Julian wouldn’t have dared to suggest it.

  From then on Max had increased the pressure to get him out, ending in a showdown which Julian would never forgive or forget. It had happened on a day when the first ambulance train actually built at Court Carriages was on exhibition to the public. A long queue of people had been waiting in the street outside to file through after local dignitaries had finished their preferential viewing. Julian had needed a little extra brandy to see him through the ceremony, though not by the slightest sign was it noticeable. He’d stood beside the Mayor of Southampton with Max, in absolute control, when suddenly a simple comment from the Mayor’s wife had affected him strangely.

  ‘It’s a really beautiful train for our boys,’ the little woman had simpered. ‘You’re doing a wonderful job to help us win the war.’

  ‘It’s not a beautiful train,’ Julian had shouted. ‘It’s bloody awful. Beautiful trains are what we used to make — and we ought to be making one now to present to the Kaiser as a peace offering, not bloody ambulances. We could stop the war in no time.’

  There’d been a horrified silence. Then calmly Max had come up with an explanation.

  ‘Your Worship, ladies and gentlemen, my partner, Mr Cromer, has a wonderful sense of humour,’ he’d said. And everyone had started to laugh. Laughter had echoed round the shop, gaining strength until those outside crowded against the doorway to know what was going on. Every town dignitary had laughed at Julian, but he had been unable to laugh at himself. He had been publicly humiliated.

  The day after that Max Berman had issued an ultimatum. Either he accepted Max’s offer to buy him out, or he faced medical and security investigations which would cause a scandal for people to remember long after the war was over. Julian had taken the money but now, two years later, there was scarcely any left. It had gone in gratifying Millicent’s unabated craving for social prestige, and in quenching his own ever-increasing thirst. And after the demise of his position at Court Carriage Works he developed an unhealthy loathing for everything to do with it.

  Soon after seeing the report about Ellie, Julian had a visitor at Fortune Cottage. He was alone at the time, and tempted to ignore the doorbell, but the caller was persistent. He walked slowly through the hall, his shoulders stooped, his knees painful with gout, and when the evening sun shone on him through the open door it was obvious the years had not been kind to him in other ways. His fair hair had turned white and receded, leaving him with a high bald dome, and his pale skin had become lined and sallow.

  An open-topped Alfonso motor car with red wheels and a smart white body was parked in the drive, and a young man wearing a leather flying helmet still rested his finger on the bell, looking up at the windows as he did so. When he saw Julian his face was wreathed in smiles.

  ‘Mr Cromer! I’m so glad you’re in. My name’s Walter Goddard. You won’t know me, but I’m related to friends of yours and they asked me to look you up if ever I was in Southampton.’

  ‘Friends?’ queried Julian.

  ‘May I come inside?’ Once he had gained entry and the door was closed the stranger’s manner changed. He became conspiratorial. ‘Is there somewhere we can talk in private?’

  ‘My study.’

  Walter Goddard removed the helmet and put it in the pocket of his coat. His leather gloves he took off and held. Julian went ahead of him down the corridor and showed him into the book-lined room where these days he did his drinking undisturbed. Once satisfied there could be no eavesdropping, Walter went to the desk and poured himself a glass of brandy. The liberty astounded his host, but for some reason he remained silent.

  ‘Not easy to afford brandy like this these days, is it?’ the fellow said. ‘I’d say you’ll soon be finding it very difficult indeed.’ He paused. ‘Unless you’d like to earn enough to keep you supplied indefinitely?’

  ‘Tell me more,’ said Julian.

  Walter scrutinised him unnervingly. Then: ‘I know I can trust you. I’m Hans Gottmann’s nephew. Gottman is my real name.’

  Now it was Julian’s turn to smile. He was surprised and delighted to welcome a relative of Ha
ns, and began plying him with questions.

  ‘Have you seen them? More important, have you heard anything of Johann and my daughter?’

  ‘I’ve not seen Johann — he’s in the front line fighting the French — but I’ve seen Charlotte.’

  ‘Oh, that’s wonderful,’ breathed Julian. ‘Is she well? What’s she doing?’

  ‘She’s well at the moment,’ the young man told him. He slapped the leather gloves against the palm of his left hand. ‘It really depends on you whether she stays healthy.’

  It took a minute for the truth to dawn on Julian. He had opened his door to a German spy, and it seemed he was about to be drawn into something he definitely wouldn’t like.

  ‘Are you blackmailing me?’ he asked, his voice level in spite of the shock.

  ‘Let’s say there is a job we would very much like you to do,’ said Walter Goddard, who sounded so completely English it seemed incredible that he was not. ‘It will be in your own interest to agree. More specifically, it will be in the interest of your daughter. I’m sure you’ll understand when I say her life depends on your cooperation.’

  *

  William’s platoon of engineers was with the American First Army in the battle to recapture the French town of St Mihiel after four years of German occupation. The weather couldn’t have been worse. Heavy rain and wind swept across the hillsides, and when they moved forward each night the lorries became bogged down in mud. It was worse for the infantry and artillery men. When they were within a kilometre of the line the sky became red with flashes from enemy guns, and exploding shells caused an immense number of casualties. The road was littered with dead soldiers, but like everyone else William had become immune to the sight, and he no longer shuddered.